Who wants to play with (virtual) fashion dolls?

If you’re Italian and over 20, there is a strong chance that you spent several childhood afternoons with crayons, white sheets of paper, and a Fashion Wheel. For those of you who don’t know what we’re talking about, be it because you’re too young or because this game didn’t exist in your country, Fashion Wheel was a board game for little fashionistas, that allowed you to be a stylist by letting you create different combinations of the different wheels composing the round plastic board, creating different outfits. These same little fashionistas exchanged their Fashion Wheel for Barbie dolls later on, even if creativity was less stimulated here, because of the limits of Barbie’s clothing, which was a lot more expensive than the paper-made clothes of the game of their earlier childhood. That said, the fascination for Fashion Wheel, that involved scissors, crayons and paper definitely stayed in the minds of a lot of those from that generation. Think of Jeremy Scott, for whom those very sketches worked as inspiration when designing the Moschino Spring Summer 2017 collection, in which his clothes play with a trompe l’oeil effect, transforming catwalk models into animated dolls. Nostalgia aside, creating our very own fashion sketches, choosing infinite combinations of clothing and accessories, was definitely an important moment of creativity for us as kids, just like composing our look of the day in front of the mirror is today, while choosing among the clothes in the closet in front of us.

But our wardrobe has its limits, just like Barbie’s: so what would happen, if we had a huge virtual shop from where we could pick clothes for our outfits, without any limit? We tried that out on Seezona, a website that connects major retailers with our world, allowing us to see what clothes would look like on a model that you can customise with your very own proportions, helping you decide on those clothes that you don’t dare add to your cart without trying them on, maybe because you don’t know how that one brand will fit you, or because the design, color or textile don’t entirely convince you. If the inability to try clothes on is the main downside of online shopping, the chance to create your very own virtual alter ego, to help you imagine how that top or that skirt would look on your body, can definitely help decide whether you should click on the “buy” button or not. We will never have a complete guarantee that what we buy online will fit us just fine, but it is also true that this sounds a lot better than just trying our luck. And don’t worry, if it still doesn’t work out, you can just send everything back, free of charge. And anyway, let’s be honest: who doesn’t want to use the freedom to spend hours trying on new clothes, without the obligation to buy anything? It will remind us all of our time as kids, playing on the carpet, surrounded by crayons, completely carefree.